Yacht Aditi

A Generation Later…

We’ve read about people making long journeys and over time just about everything possible seems to happen. You start to think what that? And that? Oh no there’s more. Is this really the case?

Short answer…if it can happen it eventually does…or it’s just round the corner.

Our Onan generator was borne in 1988 and having trundled on for 26 years, a generation, decided to semi-retire. Instead of pushing out 220V it was dropping, and finally remained at, 110V.

So we had the ‘not the Cuban’ Davis over from Prickly Bay Marina to have a scout around. He checked the control box which I did not expect to reveal much having been through it myself. I thought the trouble was down at the rotor but looking at the rusted bolts on the sound cabinet it was going to be very difficult to strip down the casing and get inside. To make matters worse the nuts were all imperial size so it needed a trip downtown to get some spanners with funny looking measures written on them in fractions…

Turns out that the bolts are randomly both metric and imperial. Some unbolted but others were rusted studs. Puzzled as to how to attack these since I was out of 240V which eliminated power tools I suddenly remembered that battery angle grinder the ARC made me buy.

A bit of a grind and some seriously hot (I fitted a new Hella fan to the ceiling of the engine room otherwise work was impossible) poking around I extracted the casing. Everything looked good at the rotor head but moving things about recovered our 240V output. So we have been saved from another journey to an Onan centre (like The Caymans) and it’s more contact cleaning required to stabilise the output.

One major benefit…I can at last read the otherwise most concealed engine number known to mankind!

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